Intel Announces i9-9900K With Soldered TIM & Unlocked 28-Core Xeon

In one of the latest in worst-kept secrets in the tech industry, Intel will be releasing its 9th generation Core-series processors, with the flagship i9-9900K being the first CPU in a very long time, to come with a soldered IHS. It seems competition has finally pushed Intel over the edge and forced it to reintroduce something that was removed over 7 years ago.

The new i9-9900K will be Intel’s first broad volume 5 GHz processor, as well as its first mainstream 8-core CPU. The soldered thermal interface for the IHS should help keep these chips a lot cooler, and able to overclock a lot further, without modification. This has long been a sore point with Intel CPUs over the years, with some seriously throttled parts in the past (Haswell springs to mind).

Taking another page out of AMD’s book is some new-styled packaging, dropping the age-old box, and introducing a brand new shell in the shape of a dodecahedron – which I’m pretty sure will make stacking them a real pain.

To show off the prowess of the new CPU, and how powerful it is at gaming, Intel threw some really challenging games at it, like PUBG and World of Tanks, being played at the same time in two virtual machines, while streaming them at the same time. I guess when a single game can barely stress a modern CPU with multiple cores, marketing has to invent a problem for the product. This kind of marketing was almost as bad as the ‘extreme megatasking’ with Skylake-X launch, or the 28-core 5GHz stunt. I guess Intel is a little rusty with it’s marketing these days.

The new CPUs will support existing Z370 chipsets with a suitable UEFI upgrade, but Z390 boards will be launching too. All three CPUs will have the same 95W TDP, and 16 native PCIe lanes. The IGP is the same as what was launched with the 8th-gen CPUs, so don’t expect much in the way of graphical prowess. The irony of a gaming CPU.

It wasn’t just the i9-9900K getting all the attention, as later on we were introduced to the updated High End Desktop (HEDT) Core-X processors, which basically follow the same launch lineup as we saw with the 7980XE launch. These CPUs were meant to be an answer to AMD’s Threadripper launch, and as such will scale to the same 18-cores 36-threads, but with higher clock speeds, and better scaling of frequency in low core-count workloads.

These new HEDT parts will support DDR4-2666 natively, but should scale fine to 4000 MHz+. And like the mainstream parts above, gone is the grey goop that Intel calls thermal paste, and is again swapped out for the much better soldered interface, something that was arguably one of the biggest issues people had with the original Core-X launch.

One pleasant surprise as well is that Intel has removed the artificial product segmentation as well, as seven of the new Core-X CPUs will have all 68 PCIe 3.0 lanes made available (split as 44 direct to the CPU and 24 to the chipset). Intel showed off a few benchmarks too, as they compared the 18-core i9-9980XE against AMD’s 32-core Ryzen Threadripper 2990WX, and beat it under select workloads. However, AMD has since released a new microcode update to enable something called Dynamic Local Mode, so it’ll be interesting to see if these numbers hold up.

All these new Core-X CPUs will be released on the existing LGA2066, X299 motherboard platform, and will be compatible with existing boards with a UEFI update. All of these new chips will also have the same 165W TDP, so some lower-end motherboards may struggle with the power requirements.

Last up, and technically the first actually announced on Intel’s livestream, is confirmation of Intel’s push for higher core-count CPUs for workstations. We saw the publicity stunt back at Computex 2018, where Intel showed off a 28-Core CPU overclocked to 5 GHz, with some rather extreme cooling hidden under the desk.

Many of our suspicions have now been confirmed, as this will be Intel’s premium workstation platform, built around the LGA3647 socket used in its servers, and will be a teir above the Core-X series. The Xeon W-3175X was the only announced CPU at this time, the flagship of the platform, as it’s the same 28-core Skylake-X CPU we saw at Computex, albeit with more sane clock speeds. It’ll boost up to 4.3 Ghz, but this is likely the single-core turbo, with more cores lowering the clock as needed.

What makes this chip so special is that it’s an unlocked Xeon, meaning it can be overclocked, something that Intel has been firmly against for a very long time. In addition, it carries over many of the Xeon features, including 6-channel memory, and ECC support.

With a TDP of 255 Watts though, a rather beefy motherboard and cooler will be required. Back at Computex we saw some suitably extreme boards by ASUS and GIGABYTE, with dual PSU support for 2x 24-pin connectors and 4x 8-pin EPS power lines to the CPU, spread over 32 phases. The option of having 12 memory slots for 192GB of RAM, pushing 125 GB/s of bandwidth, should really help push rendering workloads. How this chip will compare to AMD’s 2990WX, will prove to be interesting.

On demo was a rendering session from Tangent Studios, with a project from its latest film, Next Gen. The Blender project was shown to have improved rendering times by as much as 15%, using Intel’s Embree ray tracing system. This didn’t just speed up render times, but also improved time estimation, as things became less erratic during complex scenes. This will be something we’ll dig into later.

What Intel didn’t divulge at this time, was the price of the 28-core beast. Considering that the 9980XE is nearly $2000, and Xeons carry a price premium as well, we expect prices to be in the $5000+ range, but we’ll find out closer to launch later this year.

The mainstream i9-9900K is now available for pre-order, as is customary with these launches, and official product launch will be October 19th. The Core-X and Xeon launches are still to be determined, but expect a release within the next couple of months.